Special meeting called as ‘real battle’ over budget begins

An extra round of negotiations on the EU’s 2014-20 multiannual spending proposal is to be held in October to give member states more time to narrow differences on the multibillion euro plan.

Officials from the Polish presidency of the EU’s Council of Ministers and the European Commission said that a 10 October meeting of European affairs ministers would now additionally include discussions on the EU’s multiannual financial framework (MFF). That meeting will come five days after the Commission is expected to present specific plans on a financial transactions tax and the future shape of the EU’s cohesion policy.

Special conference

The extra meeting comes on top of two other additional rounds planned for November and December and a special conference on the MFF, which is to be held on 20-21 October in Brussels. That conference will bring together national parliamentarians, MEPs and member states to discuss the proposal.

Poland is to present a progress report to the European Council in December, after which Denmark, the holder of the EU presidency as of January, will take over the chair for the negotiations.

The decision to provide an opportunity for talks on 10 October comes after member states appeared to make scant progress in a first round of negotiations on the Commission’s proposal on Monday (12 September). Then, Austria, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK said that the Commission’s proposal was “too high”. The Commission is proposing €1,053 billion in commitments over the 2014-20 period.

Birgitta Ohlsson, Sweden’s EU affairs minister, organised a meeting of the eight countries ahead of Monday’s negotiations. The eight issued a joint letter that said the proposal “must be reduced”. Ohlsson said that the proposal had to reflect current austerity measures and the debt crisis. “We need to spend better, not spend more,” she said. During the closed-door talks, Germany demanded that the Commission’s proposal be reduced by €100bn-€120bn.

Start of budget battle

Janusz Lewandowski, the European commissioner for financial programming and budget, said the letter signalled that “the real battle had begun” over spending. He maintained that the Commission’s proposal reflected the current mood of austerity at national level.

Lewandowski and Mikolaj Dowgielewicz, Poland’s secretary of state for European affairs, played down the opposition from the eight member states. Dowgielewicz said that there was “nothing surprising” in the letter, which simply restated the known positions of the countries involved.

Monday’s talks also revealed member state concerns over the structure of the proposal. Spain and Greece, large recipients of EU cohesion funds, raised fears that the Commission’s proposal to increase flexibility in the way funds are spent could affect their regional aid handouts. France criticised plans to keep financing for the ITER international fusion research project outside the EU budget. But Commission and presidency sources said that no objections were raised by member states on the proposed seven-year duration of the MFF.